Sunday, May 19, 2002

Weblogs

So I was just thinking how odd it is that weblogs in general have taken off.

I remember back in my freshman year at school when I first ran across James Peret's online diary. He just put random thoughts about absolutely everything in his life up on a web page served off his PC in his dorm room. Reading it was a great way to figure out what was going on in his life, although honestly, we probably would have been better off just talking ;-).

Later, when I had my own problems (or so I thought) to vent about, I put them up on my own diary. I guess I didn't really think anyone would read what I wrote there. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone did, other than Rochelle, who sent me this long email about how I should have been doing something about my problems instead of just writing about them where random strangers could read it. She was right of course, not that it changed anything.

I suppose r0b also read them, although I can't think of any concrete proof of that. For a while there, we had a tendency to find out random things about our lives by reading them on each other's web pages. I suppose that was probably a bad thing, but hey, that's us.

And now, you can go to any number of different websites and download tools for doing just what we used to do with just a text editor and some flat html pages. What was once the province of the geeks of the world has begun the process of moving into the realm of normal people.

It's kind of odd, and there's a temptation to be a little annoyed by it, just like it's easy to be annoyed by the way the web has moved into mainstream popular culture, but really, it's not good, or bad, it just is.